Sunday, 6 April 2014

A Space Odyssey

Last night, Mane's little brother had a birthday party. He does that every year, because he has a birthday every year. Shocking concept, I know, but many people seem to like birthdays so much that they make it an ANNUAL EVENT. Mine last month was more of a cue to stick cards on my wall which I haven't removed yet and buy a 2DS because they didn't actually get me one.In any case, along we went, and thus it began with me walking into a room which already contained Mane Jr. along with his older brother and my friend-who-is-a-midwife (who is also their sister) cooking pizza. I immediately regretted having already had soup, but took some pizza anyway. Already in attendance were my friend-who-is-a-teacher and Einstein, although that's not important, as Robinson and Lovely, the young raver, scene girl and about 4,987,545 others* turned up and started spanking jelly.Uhm, I should probably explain: a large amount of (vegetarian) jelly made its appearance at some point during the course of the evening, toted by Mane Jr.'s mother, at which point somebody produced a fishslice from somewhere and decided to smack the jelly, producing a pleasantly wobbly effect. Evidently, this was so hilarious that we ended up passing the thing around, my turn yielding an immediate flashback in my mind to the last time I spanked someone. My resultant actions were almost too precise.Anyway, I digress.At one of these parties, the inevitability is that somebody will stick on the best of S Club 7 at some point (for the curious, this CD actually has a title; it's Best, for some reason). By "somebody", I do in fact mean my friend-who-is-a-midwife, but the again, she owns the CD. After various shenanigans involving doughnuts (don't ask), crotch pumping (totally innocent) and balls in beer (not what you think!) all to the tunes of S Club 7, somebody produced Now 50. And I was 16 again.I'd forgotten about that year. 2001 was somewhat unremarkable to me, as it was just a year of idleness and inaction. That's all a lie. It contained the first and only time I asked someone out, my first and only rejection and my first suicide attempt, in that order for quite obvious reasons. However, it was also part of my continuing sexual development, although I hadn't started masturbating then, so this mostly consisted of lying on my bed thinking "sexy" thoughts and enjoying the feeling of my penis growing hard and pulsing gently until it felt painful and I reverted to feeling like I had three seconds to live in order to refer to normality.So, yeah, that's what the Wheatus cover of A Little Respect makes me think of.Music brings back memories, especially if you're listening to it specifically because of the memories. Green Day's Nimrod does this to me, and probably will again because I haven't listened to it for years. Now 50 brought these things back to me:- Wondering how the hell someone thought DJ Ötzi singing Hey Baby! was a good idea.- Marvelling at how many height references Lighthouse Family manage to shoehorn into any track.- Remembering how Travis singing the word "sing" over and over again sounds like there's been a lot of thought put into that lyric, when the exact opposite is true.- Being confounded by how desperate someone must be to get into the charts in order to release a song called Because I Got High.- Despairing at how easy it is to forget all about James when compiling music CDs.

None of which made any difference. For that time, I was 16 again and being surrounded by people I've known since I was 5, including the person I used to hang around with at school the most, made this depressingly realistic.

And then we have Louise Redknapp.

In 2001(ish), one of my friends who I haven't mentioned here before developed a crush on Louise (who, at that point, didn't have a surname for some reason), and kept me guessing for a period of about 45 minutes, mostly on account of the fact that I had absolutely no idea who she was. I still don't get the point of celebrity crushes, but then this guy also seemed to like Melinda Messenger and all five Spice Girls, so maybe he wasn't really that choosy after all. A few months later, I was idly flicking through the newspaper and came across a picture of Louise, and I remember thinking something along the lines of, "oh, right, okay."

I'm not really going anywhere with this. There are too many memories here to focus on and make a coherent post about one or two. And, at that moment last night, there were too many then, as well.So I went back to spanking jelly.That seemed to make sense.* may be an overestimate